


Storybook Ending

by formergirlwonder (orphan_account)



Series: Blue + Gold = Green [8]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: 2.5 WPF Club, Because at this point Betty knows, Betty is a badass Karen Page-style investigative journalist, Betty wants to Have It All (TM), But he edited really really hard, F/M, Future Fic, House Hunters is a microcosm of humanity, I can hardly deal with how intensely I ship this, Juggie is ace even though I didn't say it explicitly, Jughead already has pretty much everything he wants, Jughead is a bestselling author, So she isn't making a big deal or anything, So the final product isn't cringeworthy, but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-10-14 23:45:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10546386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/formergirlwonder
Summary: Betty and Jughead were twenty-eight, and had each risen meteorically to the top of their chosen fields. They had settled into normalcy with aplomb, they had managed to reconcile with their families (even if Betty had needed to force Jughead and FP into Jughead’s office together to make that last one possible). No further members of their friend group had come to violent ends, no matter how many times Betty fitfully dreamed that they had. Everything should have been right, and yet too often, Betty woke with the nagging feeling that she didn’t deserve the blessings she had--that one day, she would wake up and he would be gone, that the fragile storybook-ending equilibrium they had built together would tumble down, revealing itself to be a flimsy stucco-and-cardboard facade.Betty, Jughead, a job offer, and a sleepless night.





	

Betty Cooper stared listlessly at the Home Network as an over-enthusiastic couple insisted, with perky vigor, that if they were going to downsize their lifestyle to a “tiny house”, then said tiny house absolutely MUST have (a. plenty of storage space, b.) an indoor shower and bathtub, d.) a full kitchen, e.) space for a Great Dane, and f.) “style and charm”, whatever that was supposed to mean.

Beside her, Jughead had fallen asleep, instantly and quietly as he always did. It was a joke of theirs: one second, he would be fully-functioning; the next second, dead to the world. He attributed it to his brief stint of homelessness; she attributed it to years of slumber parties with Archie Andrews, Snore Machine Extraordinaire.

They’d curled up on the couch to watch the Home Network together, even though it was 3 AM and the only thing on was House Hunters (or more accurately, Tiny House Hunters). But he’d fallen asleep and left her staring at the TV, watching a couple of college graduates eagerly debate the merits and pitfalls of Japanese soaker tubs vs. vertical showerheads.

It was a miracle, of course, that they had time to watch crappy TV together, that neither of them had died, that they had made it through high school largely unscarred, that they had survived the long-distance relationship inflicted on them by Jughead’s publisher (who insisted that he take a gap year and edit his novel into a less embarrassing condition before the happenings in Riverdale faded from the public consciousness), that they had endured everything their lives had thrown at them up until this point. They had come out stronger, better, firmer in their beliefs and more capable of acting upon them.

Still, there would always be the bad nights, when Betty would wake up screaming for Polly, when her sleeping pills just didn’t work, when tea and blankets and glasses of water couldn’t coax her back to sleep, no matter how fervently Jughead wished they could. (If Jughead had bad nights, Betty never noticed: he slept quietly and motionlessly, in perfect, undisturbed repose. On mornings when he hugged her too tight, as if he was trying to staunch a gaping wound with the sheer force of his grip, she never complained.)

Like all couples, they fought. He stewed in silent fury when she invited FP to his birthday dinner, barely managing a modicum of politeness before retreating to his office to work on another chapter, leaving Betty to play embarrassed hostess to a house full of their friends and colleagues. (“ _He’ll probably be back in a minute,” she’d insisted with a gracious smile, blinking once too often with her head held up high. “You know how writers get!” A low chuckle from the table at that one, while the guests who thought they understood what had happened gave her their kindest sympathetic glances._ ) She broke down in unbridled rage when the first draft of his second novel featured a too-honest depiction of a girl struggling with mental illness (“ _I’m not your fucking muse, Jughead!” she had yelled, her face streaked over with tears, swatting his hand away when he tried to convince her to look at him and breathe. “What the hell do you think gives you the right?_ ”). When he logged into her Twitter account by accident and discovered her ever-accumulating list of death threats, he begged her to quit her job, _and just do something safe, Betts, please, I swear to God, no article is worth this, I don’t care if you get a Pulitzer!_ And she dug in her heels and said that she wasn’t afraid, and not _all_ of them could write New York Times bestsellers. He’d told her that they hadn’t faced death together so that she could throw her life away investigating corruption in the foster care system, and she’d told him that she hadn’t faced death with him so that she could sit safely by while people in power abused that power, and she certainly hadn’t faced death so that she could become part of “ _JH Jones lives in New York with his girlfriend Betty and their two dogs,_ ” which was all she ever _would_ be if she quit her job.

But the fights, though intense, were short-lived, few, and far between, and they always found each other afterwards. They never had to say “I’m sorry,” because it was written in the press of hands on cheeks and foreheads on foreheads, in the way his eyes met hers. And later, when they had apologized and forgiven and fallen in love all over again, they sat down and talked things through reasonably.

Betty and Jughead were twenty-eight, and had each risen meteorically to the top of their chosen fields. They had settled into normalcy with aplomb, they had managed to reconcile with their families (even if Betty had needed to force Jughead and FP into Jughead’s office together to make that last one possible). No further members of their friend group had come to violent ends, no matter how many times Betty fitfully dreamed that they had. Everything should have been right, and yet too often, Betty woke with the nagging feeling that she didn’t deserve the blessings she had--that one day, she would wake up and he would be gone, that the fragile storybook-ending equilibrium they had built together would tumble down, revealing itself to be a flimsy stucco-and-cardboard facade.

If her life was going to magically evaporate at the stroke of midnight, there was nothing she could do to stop it. What she could control was this: tonight, she was twenty-eight, and she had to decide, by the end of the week, how she wanted the rest of her life to look.

Her boss had offered her a promotion, shipping her out to chronicle failures in the infrastructure supporting poverty-stricken families behind the front lines of conflicts abroad. She’d spend a year away from home, away from him, but she’d get to shape coverage, to report the truth for once, to help thousands of people. But she knew that all Jughead would hear if she told him was “ _front lines_ ” and “ _conflicts abroad_ ”.

She’d asked Jughead, the other night, what would have happened to them if Jason Blossom hadn’t died, if Polly hadn’t been sent to the Sisters, if they had grown up with less in the way of life-threatening danger. Would he have ever found the courage to climb up a ladder into her room and tell her that they were all crazy, to gently kiss the breath out of her lungs until all she wanted to breathe was him? But he hadn’t known, he’d just shrugged and told her that there were thousands upon billions of ways their lives could have turned out, and he just felt lucky that they’d gotten such a good outcome. “You’d probably be married to Archie,” he’d mused thoughtfully, “and I’d have probably considered pulling a _Love, Actually_ and then chickened out at the last moment.” She’d laughed way too hard at that.

Their luck had held thus far; the question was how much farther she was willing to push it.

Experience had taught Betty that the reason why the story of Romeo and Juliet was timeless was that Romeo and Juliet are themselves timeless: golden statues, reaching out, entwined but not entirely one. But remove the tragedy, and Juliet becomes Mrs. Montague down the street, equally good at stitching up clothes and knife wounds, with a knack for out-of-the-way herbs and a few gray hairs starting to show up in the crown of her head. If the message had come through, or if Mercutio had beat Tybalt, or if the potion had worn off just a hair faster, then Romeo and Juliet would have sat down to breakfast every morning, and made small talk about his job and the children, and none of the neighbors would have known that the Montagues (middle-aged and tiredly smiling, but normal, ever so _normal_ ) had once watched their friends die and their world crumble around them.

Romeo and Juliet would never have fallen out of love: she refused to believe that. But they would have had to grow old, to contend with reality, to nurse their children through colds, to calculate their taxes. Romeo might forget their anniversary one year, and Juliet would be upset and frustrated and maybe try to change her hairdo, but eventually give in, because it wasn’t his fault he had to work late.

That hadn’t happened to Betty yet. But Archie had forgotten his anniversary, and Val had been a wreck when she’d called, because _I gave up my entire career to be a stay-at-home mom, and what if it wasn’t worth it?_ Veronica and Betty and Josie had met Val for lunch to cheer her up, to field the existential questions she raised, to remind her that of course Archie loved her, of course their marriage would survive this, Archie had a history of forgetting his own birthday, so she shouldn’t worry, and maybe in a few years they’d be able to laugh about the time when Archie forgot his anniversary, raced home from work a few hours late, wolfed down the fancy dinner Val had slaved over all day without noticing that it was cold, asked in the middle of a bite where the kids had gone (only to say, “Cool,” when Val informed him that Fred was watching them), went upstairs to work on a new song since the kids weren’t bothering him for once, and only realized it was his anniversary when he noticed it the next day on his phone’s calendar.

And then, sufficiently comforted, Val had turned the conversation to Veronica and Cheryl’s latest adventure, which involved skydiving but wasn’t quite the same thing, and Betty wondered idly if Cheryl and Veronica would ever buy a house, or if they’d still be jumping from extreme sports to expensive cuisine to designer clothes when they were eighty.

After the entree had arrived, Val had mentioned, in an offhandedly casual way, that Jughead and Archie had been texting each other rather a lot, and did that mean they were planning to go--(dramatic pause)--ring shopping? Veronica had squealed, and Josie had hugged Betty hard, and then Veronica had loudly called dibs on maid of honor, which got the whole table excitedly squabbling over dress colors.

The question wasn’t whether Betty would say yes. Obviously, she would. She loved Jughead more than life itself, so much that her chest clenched triumphantly every time she saw him smile. They had been living together since the moment she finished her bachelor’s degree, and they were practically married already. She knew everything about him, from the way he liked his coffee in the morning to his habit of cramming his button-down shirts into his dresser drawer instead of hanging them up.

So the question was, _what next?_

Betty had always known what he wanted: stability. Peace and quiet, the idyllic “two point five kids and a white picket fence” life that he had never had. For someone who pretended to be an ironic, brooding social outcast, Jughead was a homebody at heart, and every gain towards domesticity was precious to him, whether it was the adoption of their first shelter dog, the paint job they had done on the upstairs bedroom (Jackson Pollock-style splatter-painting each other in the process), or the return address stickers she’d had printed to save them time, which read, “ _Jughead Jones and Betty Cooper_ ”, followed by their address. He wanted all that, because he’d dreamed about it at night, imagining it wistfully, the life that would never be his.

But Betty had watched as her parents destroyed each other, she’d gradually come to the horrified realization that they might never have been in love, that her existence might be a lie. She’d listened to her mom kick her dad out, heard those final crippling words, “What will people _think_?” And so more than anything else in the world, Betty feared becoming a slave to public opinion.

Beside her, Jughead stirred a little and reached a blind hand over to his left side, landing just short of her knee.

This was the crux of it: loving someone was a matter of trust--of believing that no matter what intervened, they would always be there. And her fifteen-year-old self would have wanted this: would have bartered away a world for the safe, secure knowledge that she was unconditionally adored.

She’d assumed that he’d try to ask for a white picket fence, but Jughead never planned _anything_. His office was a mess, he never knew how a chapter was going to end until he wrote it, he’d convinced her to buy the first apartment they looked at instead of shopping around like normal people. He would never plan out a cookie-cutter American life for them.

They were Jughead Jones and Betty Cooper, and they didn’t have to be normal or settle down. They had faced down death together, hand in hand, and from that struggle, they had gained the freedom and the strength of will to choose their own version of normal.

Betty kicked off her shoes, shut off the TV, and pulled her hair out of its ponytail, shifting her weight gently towards the right side of the couch so as not to wake Jughead. He woke up anyway, though, and stared at her.

“Betts, you alright? Did I fall asleep on you?” Then he sat up more fully. “Do you want some water? Or pills?”

She shook her head. “Nope.”

“What’d they pick?” he asked, conversationally, scooting off the couch and trying to locate the dogs.

“Huh?” she said, more than a little blindsided. “Who?”

“John and Kelsey, twenty-six and twenty-four? Did they go for the yurt, or the trailer?”

She blinked a little more. “Oh. I must have fallen asleep.”

He turned around, silhouetted in the doorway. “That’s great.”

In the morning, she’d tell him about the job offer, and they’d talk it over (and then they’d co-write an email turning it down--her providing polite turns of phrase such as “ _unfortunately, I’m afraid I’m going to have to reject your kind offer_ ”, him suggesting additions like, “ _who the hell do you think you are, expecting me to thank you for sending me into a warzone?_ ”). They’d sit down over breakfast and talk about their plans for the day (he’d fry eggs, she’d make pancakes, he’d squeeze orange juice, she’d make coffee--black with one sugar for him, milk and no sugar for her).

As for the rest, they’d figure it out. They always did.

**Author's Note:**

> Be sure to leave a comment!!! Love you guys!


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